In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.

When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.

According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include:

Accreditation

Joint distribution, including distribution by the blade partner of Postgres Plus

Interface between the blade partner and EnterpriseDB’s field organization

Of the 16 blade partnerships announced in the initial press release, only one much resembles the datablade concept. That would be HyperBac, which is offering compression and encryption, as part of high-performance backup. (Bob says HyperBac’s compression reduces exported file size by around 90%, and it’s also extremely fast.) From where I sit, that’s a modified data access method, and hence worthy of the term “blade.”

Bob said that the next closest thing EnterpriseDB has to a true datablade at this time, and getting closer, actually is none of the other 15 partnerships. It’s Oracle compatibility. That makes sense; Oracle compatibility starts in the parser, and might have data access method and hence optimization implications as well. However, in saying this Bob presumably was not counting support for datatypes such as text and geospatial. Unless I’m very wrong about how they’re implemented, those are about as genuine as datablades ever get.

Comments

Thanks Curt for the mention about the EnterpriseDB Blade partner program. We are very excited about the strong reception we are having to the program and I think you will see some very nice adoption of the program by a number of new innovators in the software market. One being WaveMaker a very slick Ajax development tool for creating information intensive applications against Postgres Plus.

With regard to our Oracle compatibility. As you know, our solutions have had deep Oracle compatibility since the launch of our company and we continue to make strong progress on ensuring this deep compatibility into the future. This is one of our many core strengths in our solution set as you know.